A Craft Cocktail Blog for the Home Bartender that Focuses on Original Creations Drawn from Culinary Inspiration.

I’ve been feeling creative lately, but sometimes the pressure of doing a full photoshoot stops me from posting a perfectly nice drink. To address this I am starting a new series of “Sunday Night Sessions” wherein I will trade some production quality for actually posting a drink I find interesting.

Phone cameras are getting pretty good these days, so I feel like I can put out a passable product, but the point here is to not stress about it too much. This drink explores two different ideas that have been spinning around in my mind lately.

Oil Syrup

First, I have been increasingly fixated on finding ways to integrate fat into drinks. Cocktails are mostly lean. Many aromatic drinks have an expression of citrus oil as a garnish, such as variants on the martini and the manhattan, but for some reason, they stop there.

Some old comfort food classics like the White Russian and the Grasshopper incorporate milk or cream, and hot buttered rum tries to integrate butter into a hot toddy. More recently, (well, 2009) I saw this recipe for cold buttered rum floating around the internet. Someone figured out that you could create a delicious and stable butter syrup using ticaloid gum, and used it to make a cold version of the classic. Is a butter emulsion reconstructed milk?

Ticaloid gum is proprietary, and can be substituted by a 9:1 mixture of xanthan gum to gum arabic. It works really well in the butter, because it gives a produces a thick, creamy mouthfeel, but when I tried it with other oils I did not like it. One of my guests compared a szechuan chili oil emulsion with ticaloid gum to a mango smoothie, but it wasn’t the texture of a fresh blended mango, it was the texture of a bottled pasteurized supermarket mango smoothie. I did not find this to be appetizing. The texture distracted from the flavor, to the point of ruin.

Now I make my oil syrups with the scarcest amount of xanthan gum possible to achieve a stable emulsion. They still come out a little milky; the more fat you use, the creamier the syrup becomes.

Chemesthesis

Chemesthesis is defined as the chemical sensibility of the skin and mucous membranes. Chemesthetic sensations arise when chemical compounds activate receptors associated with other senses that mediate pain, touch, and thermal perception. These chemical-induced reactions do not fit into the traditional sense categories of taste and smell. Examples of chemesthetic sensations include the burn-like irritation from capsaicin and related compounds in foods like chili peppers; the coolness of menthol in mouthwashes and topical analgesic creams; the stinging or tingling of carbonated beverages in the nose and mouth; the tear-induction of cut onions; and the pungent, cough-inducing sensation in the back of the throat elicited by the oleocanthal in high-quality extra virgin olive oil.[2] Some of these sensations may be referred to as spiciness, pungency, or piquancy.

I have been especially fascinated with chemesthetic sensations in drinks, and I have found that fats are ideal carriers for many of these compounds. Indeed, kumquat is rich in an aromatic compound called limonene, which is a skin irritant and which can produce a numbing sensation. It is found in the peels of most citrus fruits, but kumquat has a high concentration of it, and is unusual in that most people eat the skin of the kumquat whole, whereas other citrus has too much bitter pith.

If you’ve ever bitten into a citrus peel and felt that numbing sensation, then you know what I’m aiming for. It’s a similar, and equally enjoyable numbness to that of a szechuan peppercorn.

Inspiration

I found the idea for this drink in the Alinea cookbook, which I picked up when I was fortunate enough to visit them last year. In the book, he describes a dish in which one component is a candied kumquat filled with sesame oil and aquavit.

Come Quat About It1.5 oz Aquavit, preferably caraway-forward
3-4 raw kumquats
3-4 poached kumquats, sous vide at 85C for 20 minutes
.75 oz black sesame orgeat
Muddle the kumquats until they are fully smashed, yielding all of their juice. Be sure to macerate the peels to get out as much oil as possible. Shake over ice and then double strain through a fine mesh strainer. This is laborious but worth it.

Garnish with black sesame seeds.

If you are serving this to a group, you might want to muddle and strain the drink in advance, and then shake it to order. Toasting the sesame seeds will help to increase their aroma.

Black Sesame “Orgeat”100g water
100g sugar
45g toasted black sesame oil
.1 gram xanthan gum
Make a slurry of 10:1 granulated sugar:xanthan gum, and blend it together with a fork. In a microwave or a small pot, combine 100g water with 99g sugar until all the sugar is integrated and the syrup is clear. Add the oil and 1.1 grams of the xanthan slurry and integrate it using a hand-blender.

I am back from my winter hiatus to post some Valentine’s miscellany. My friend Johan and I like to make multi-course dessert and cocktail menus for Valentine’s day. It’s bromantic. This year we have a series of four, and I swear I will post them all eventually. This is the second in the series, as the first needs a reshoot.

As you can see, this drink required equipment. The above is a siphon pot, an esoteric geeky device for brewing coffee. The bunsen burner heats the water in the lower chamber, which rises into the upper chamber, where it steeps with various reagents. The brewer then turns off the flame, and the water falls back into the lower chamber through a filter, leaving beautiful tea or coffee behind.

We caught it on film! Mild seizure warning. We ran into some technical issues with the timing of the flash, leaving us with a hideous flicker that feels like shrieking daemonic madness echoing from the tenebrous depths of the ultimate abyss. Steady your gaze and steel your will, dear reader, lest your mind should be consumed by an eldritch abomination.

In this case, I used the siphon pot to make tea out of blue pea flower and sweet osmanthus. The pea flower was mostly for color, the osmanthus for flavor. Pea flower, as you probably know, extracts into a brilliant indigo, and then, in the presence of acid, turns purple.

The trick with using pea flower in a cocktail is to make the imbiber of the dramatic transformation. If you just shake it up with your other ingredients, you get purple. What you want is blue, a theatrical transformation, and then purple. The siphon pot solves this problem handily, as it allows us to brew the hot toddy table-side, and in a way that draws attention to this beautiful chemical reaction.

This drink was designed to pair with a unique dessert designed by Johan, which he calls “Love in a Blooming Meadow”. We wanted to realize a fantasy motif in this dish, and I thought it would be fun to expand on that theme with my drink. The dish has liquorice yoghurt, matcha, cardamom cake, rose-scented meringue, and pistachio dacquoise.

To complement this, I chose hendrick’s gin and floral tea, and sweetened it with wildflower honey. In terms of ingredients this drink is relatively simple, but when it comes to warm drinks I often find simple is best. The delight of this drink is the rich color, the beautiful presentation, and the surprising juiciness of the flavor, despite a relatively small amount of juice.

Brew the peaflower tea in the siphon part, starting with the peaflower alone. Once the blue color of pea flowers is fully extracted, add the osmanthus and lemon juice, stir, and steep for one minute. Kill the flame and allow the tea to settle in the bottom chamber of the siphon pot. In a teacup, measure out gin and honey syrup*. Pour the hot tea into the cup.

*To make honey syrup, choose a high quality wildflower honey, and mix equal parts of honey and water in a pot over low heat, until just combined.

This will, as you no doubt intuit, be my final post of the year. I will confess that the subtitle “The Hot New Holiday Trend” is more aspirational than fact, but you, gentle reader, can easily actualize it.

Glam Nog is not a specific recipe, it’s more like a feeling you get, deep inside your heart. It’s the friends you made along the way. It’s edible glitter and gold sprinkled all over the top of your egg nog. You can make glam nog with two ingredients: your favorite egg nog from the grocery store, and edible gold.A fancy ribbon will also go a long way, but let’s be real, you can also go much, much bigger.

Below I will give my recipe for luxurious, silky, dare I say it, glamorous egg nog. Think of it as my Christmas present to you, and as your Christmas present to yourself.

Regarding the composition of egg nog, I will first note that many people are put off by the idea of drinking raw egg yolks, drowned in liquor or not. To me, the ideal egg nog needs to be accessible, so I chose to use créme anglaise as the base of my nog. Long-time readers may remember a previous foray of mine into the use of this ingredient. To make the créme anglaise, I followed this recipe from Chefsteps, but in lieu of the whisk/double boiler conventional method, I cooked mine sous vide at 82c for 15 minutes.

This will, of course, scramble the eggs a bit, but you can easily repair this damage by giving your custard a spin in a high speed blender. I’m not sure if this is technically correct, but it’s easy and delicious, and yields a lovely pourable custard. For mine, I also made a mélange of winter spices and cooked them into the custard. Mine was something like:

I did have a small issue from my previous work with this ingredient. The custard is too heavy, and it can’t hold any air. Shake it, blend it, whisk it — it just won’t aerate. It sinks instantly. In pursuit of aeration, I sampled several high quality local Seattle nogs, and I found that a higher milk:yolk content is one way to make the drink more frothable. Too much yolk weighs the mixture down, but more milk results in a lighter, eminently more aeratable nog.

I wanted to build on the egg flavor more, and I felt like the milkier nogs were a tease. To deliver a double whammy of egg in my nog, I had the idea to try integrating a meringue into the custard. I made an italian meringue by bringing 150 grams of sugar and 57 grams of water up to 235 C, and then pouring it into a stand mixer full of stiff peaks egg whites. The hot sugar cooks the whites and stiffens them up into a velvety, marshmallowy foam. To drive home the holiday flavor, I used a blend of white and muscovado sugar in my meringue.

For the spirits I used a 50/50 blend of vanilla bean-infused bourbon and demerara rum. I find that the presence of fatty liquids such as milk, cream, or custard makes booze taste boozier. In order to keep my nog smooth and drinkable, I dropped the proportion of alcohol down to a single ounce. An ounce of whole milk rounded out the drink, giving it a little bit of levity.

Thanksgiving is over, but I wanted to get this one out before the end of the year. It is inspired by the sandwich you make the day after Thanksgiving. You remember that, right? It was like a week ago.

I’ve been attempting a lot of sweet and savory drinks this year. I like the challenge. It took a while, but I finally had one succeed. As always, some notes on ingredients and method. The ingredients in this drink proceeded straightforwardly from the concept. I looked into my mental toolkit and found the ingredients suited the theme.

Wild Turkey Rye. Rye whiskey here fills in for the bread in the sandwich. Nothing else will do, although a splash of aquavit might not have been a miss. It pretty obviously has to be Wild Turkey, for the name.

Cranberry juice. Cranberry juice varies wildly in its sweetness. Freshly juiced cranberries are earthy, sweet, tart, and bitter. On their own they can sometimes make a fine replacement for lemon juice in a cocktail, but it is necessary to taste them and calibrate your level of simple syrup appropriately. In one iteration of this drink, I made the mistake of mixing blindly, and I over-sweetened the drink to catastrophic effect.

Mushroom reduction. Mushroom in cocktails has been a white whale of mine for some time. I cannot resist the lure of the idea: umami, earthy, funky. To make this mushroom reduction, I soaked about 50g (total) of dried porcini, morel, and chanterelle mushrooms in about a liter of water. Once the mushrooms were reconstituted, I reduced the liquid down to about 20%. Raw mushroom broth tastes like the pantry, you must heat it.

Savory Herbs Air. Perhaps I repeat myself, sometimes, and with this one I feel a bit repetitive. First, I make a syrup from rosemary, sage, and thyme. To make the syrup, I first blanch the herbs, then blend them in a high speed blender with equal parts of sugar and water, then strain through a fine mesh strainer. The resulting syrup is a lovely forest green. To 200 ml of syrup I add several teaspoons of sucrose esters and beat with a whisk in a wide mouth bowl until a light, “soapy” foam forms.

Crispy Turkey Skin. For the turkey skin, I salted the skin from a turkey leg and placed it between two oven trays lined with silpats, weighed it down with some iron plates, and baked it at a low heat for an hour. When it came out of the oven, I trimmed it into a square. Eating the skin with the drink really recalls the flavors and aromas of the Thanksgiving meal.

The dried mushroom on the skin was mostly for the photo. It looks dramatic but to be honest it does not smell great, and it is, of course, inedible. My favorite garnishes are those which transform the flavor of the drink they accompany, as with the olive in a martini. The turkey skin accomplishes that nicely. Maybe I should have done a dollop of mashed potatoes? Next year we’ll see if I can make an appetizing cocktail with turkey gravy.

Candied yams are a baffling Thanksgiving tradition. Who came up with this concept? Yams, brown sugar, and toasted marshmallows for dinner? Hey, that pairs perfectly with cream of mushroom green beans! When it comes to Thanksgiving, I am a hater, but I yam happy to drink my sweet potatoes.

First, a few notes on composition:

It’s tempting to try to mix sweet potatoes with a creamy element, but I tried this in some initial tests, and I found it to be lacking. What made this drink recipe click into place was the inclusion of lemon juice. I’ve been trying to stay away from lemon juice lately, because at some point everything just starts to feel like a whiskey sour, but the other day I found myself thinking, “if only there were a relatively neutral source of acid…”

That’s known as coming full circle. It works in this context because sweet potato and lemon is not very common in the culinary world, so the familiar becomes new again.

This drink was inspired, obviously, by that old thanksgiving staple of roast sweet potatoes with marshmallow and brown sugar. What has really become apparent to me this year is the need, not only to attend to the flavor of the drink, but also the color. Yes, I’ve always been fixated on garniture, but now more than ever I find myself obsessing over the final color of the liquid. If I use an ingredient like sweet potato or persimmon, the drink had damn well better be orange. If it’s cranberry, I demand a rich reddish purple.

For this reason, I used a mixture of half muscovado and half white sugar. Pure muscovado might have been more flavorful, but it risks turning the drink too dark. As for the sweet potato itself, the juice will oxidize into an ugly brown color within 24 hours. Make the juice the same day you intend to use it.

The extra twist to using sweet potato as an ingredient is that it’s uncomfortably starchy. When you run a sweet potato through your juicer, the intriguing and beautiful juice that comes out has a chalky mouthfeel. I tried destroying the starch with amylase enzyme, but the heat required to activate the enzyme changed the flavor, and not for the better. The juice became insipid, overly sweet, and reminiscent of boiled squash. A better practice is to let the juice settle in the fridge for a few hours, until it looks like the picture above, and then carefully pour out the juice, leaving the starch behind.

I suggest straining it several times for the best effect. The tradeoff here is that the longer you let the juice settle, the more starch you will lose, but the more your color will degrade. I found that three to four hours was the sweet spot. A little starch is inevitable, but a lot is unacceptable.

Place the sugar, water, inverted sugar, glucose and the gum Arabic in a saucepan and heat to 115°C, stirring continuously with a whisk. Once it reaches 110°C start whisking the egg whites with the cream of tartar until you reach a soft peak. Pour the cooked syrup slowly onto the whisked egg whites. Continue whisking and add the pre-soaked gelatine and cut and scraped vanilla bean. Continue to mix until the marshmallow reaches approximately 30°C. Immediately pipe onto prepared chocolate discs. Leave at room temperature to set. Spray the tips of the marshmallow with purple cocoa butter.

Alright, yes, I’m a day late for Halloween and five days late for the Stranger Things 2 Premier, but in the long run that won’t matter. Most of my traffic comes from the long tail (an excellent name for a drink), so I’ll post when I want and call it what I want. There is an evil presence in the air, whispering to artisans of all types, offering them a dark pact: turn your work into a series of ads for pop culture trends and I will bring you traffic.

I guess that makes me Dr. Faustus.

I made this drink because there was an instagram competition held by Death and Co NYC to make a drink to commemorate the new season of Stranger Things. Be sure to check out the hashtag https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/strangerthingsab/. In particular take a look at this beauty by Ashley Minette, I think it captured the aesthetic of the show more than anyone else.

In order to bring some 80s nostalgia, I decided to make a classic staple of 80s drinking, the tequila sunrise. First, let me say that the tequila sunrise is a terrible drink, best left in the 80s along with mullets and neon spandex pants on men.

That said, sometimes we can make familiar things strange, so I decided to try to update this drink to suit modern tastes by using seasonal ingredients. Instead of the usual orange juice, I used fresh persimmon juice, which is a stunning and scintillant shade of orange. Persimmon, of course, is a fall crop.

In lieu of the usual pomegranate grenadine, I made a cranberry grenadine using fresh cranberry juice, sugar, and orange flower water. I treated both of them with powdered malic acid to find an appropriate balance of flavors. Because of the layered nature of the drink, we don’t necessarily get to taste the ingredients together, and we want to ensure a pleasing balance between acidity and sweetness throughout. In practice this is difficult to achieve, but we can get close.

As always with these things, it comes down to an exercise of your personal good taste.

Pour the grenadine into the glass, then shake the other ingredients and carefully pour them over the grenadine, creating a gradient effect.

[Spoiler Alert]
The fog from the dry ice is meant to be evocative of the scene where the Mind Flayer possesses Will Byers. I tried using activated charcoal in the liquid that I poured over the dry ice, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) the resulting mobilization of CO2 vapor did not mobilize any of the charcoal particles. I did some reading and it turns out it is not possible to make colored fog using dry ice.

Erlenmeyer flasks suck as drinking vessels. The narrow neck kills any aroma that might come off of the drink, and it impacts your perception of the flavor quite a bit. They look good in the photo but they aren’t fun as serving vessels, not even with a straw.

WUBBA LUBBA DUB DUB And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Mortini tattoo those addlepated simpletons

Drink concept inspired by discourse with Mike Schmid from Apple in California

DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB WUBBA LUBBA RICK PICKLE DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB DUB I’M PICKLE RICK To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ WUBBA LUBBA DUB DUB WUBBA LUBBA DUB DUB To be fair you have to WUBBA LUBBA DUB DUB I’M PICKLE RICK As a consequence people who dislike Rick & Mortini truly ARE idiots DUB DUB WUBBA LUBBA